Solvet Seclum

Why I have lived this lengthy I don't know

It isn't as if I ran not upon

since here I am still at table with the others.

It must be the water, the water, the strength

and the velocity of the dark scherzo

with its throb born with the light of dawn

it's the erosion, the sedimentation,

the fulvous mire together with the fine clay

while night arrives with its color

luminous and quickly

it come intos the earth,

down into horizons of motherlode,

and revolves almost blue,

a warm pale virid

like a valley filled of music,

It's the dissolving, the oxidation,

the forgotten miracle

of a snow flake burning a calyx,

of the penury of the leaves by night,

and the dams and the overflows

corrosion

foretelling its time to come

and annihilation in replete creativity

between delirium and science.

The prairie field, lightly sloping,

valiant with vineyards...

The way the orb of day enters the grape,

tremble there, becomes light,

and the grapes mature, helplessly

give themselves above to beauty

and are render free of access to their coming death...

And all this dear

even before dawn!

The skeleton there among lime and silicones

and the ashes of cowardice,

the voice's enslavement to the muscle and fat

the wing's,

of the bone about to become a flute

and the brain the honeycomb of rushes

together with the violins of the worm,

the sweetness of sound that flowers in a woodworm,

the petal, rigid and crystalline,

and the of gold tooth in the living ossuary,

and the wind and the waves

of the sea with its incense,

its high seas salinity,

and the sonorous liturgy of the material part

during its brief flash of supremacy,

the confines of the catacomb in flames,

with the putrefaction that is undefiled love

where death is already beyond naming.

It is the final breath of air. Lucid ovaries!

Is that the unhurt of the nightingale?

Where novel growth sprouts,

where the tremulous fermentation

of meditation itself,

far from vain notion from life

that is not ever obliged to wait

only to be in season

to receive

from single son to the next

in the pollen-filled dawn?

CLAUDIO RODRIGUEZ (Spain,1934-1999) was a professor, a translator of T s Eliot, and a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. This piece of poetry is taken from his last volume Casi una leyenda (Tusquets, Barcelona, 1991)

JOAN LINDGREN edited and translated the anthology of the numbers of Argentine poet Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tendernes (University of California Pres 1997) Her translations of Spanish and Latin American author of poemss have appeared in such journals as DoubleTake, Luna, and verse International.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Jul/Aug 2000

Provided by means of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved